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I would buy only Hue but that's because I have more money than sense, and they don't actually make smart plugs last time I looked,

Ikea makes Zigbee smart plugs with power monitoring (Inspelning) that are ~10 Euro here (probably $10 in the US). Also Zigbee does not have all the security issues, since it is purely local and will talk with whatever hub/bridge you choose, e.g. Homey, Hubitat, or if you want to go free software Home Assistant or zigbee2mqtt.

It's somewhat insane to me that people use WiFi plugs for actuating things that actuate real-life electrical devices. Even more from companies that have a bad security reputation. Zigbee or Z-Wave all the way or possibly Matter over Thread, but the only Matter device that I had (an upgraded Eve Energy plug) has been a pain.

The real problem to solve ditching TP-Link _routers_ is that all routers are uniformly fucking awful, and all you are doing is choosing your particular poison. This is especially true after Apple exited the game so long ago.

I switched to Unifi gear (Cloud Gateway Max, two of their U7 access points, and a bunch of their managed switches) and they are a dream to set up. Making VLANs, associating VLANs with SSIDs, etc. is so easy. I had a TP Link managed switch and the interface was a huge pile of crap and I saved it several times after misconfiguration by virtue of it having a serial console. I only used it for two months or so because it was so frustrating.

Iirc ikea zigbee range have been discontinued in favour of matter

They just announced the Matter range, it isn't even in stores yet. I was at the Ikea store yesterday and they still had a good stock of Inspelning and most likely they will still have for a while (they only introduced it a year ago and it seems quite popular).

At any rate, Matter over Thread is still much better than WiFi security-wise (even though it's IPv6 routable) and Ikea's Matter over Thread plug will probably be similar price-wise. And the good thing is that probably even more people have a thread border router (Apple TV, HomePods, some Amazon Echo, Google TV Streamer 4k, etc.).

Still, these Ikea plugs are so cheap and Zigbee is extremely nice, so it doesn't hurt to buy and stock ten now for the future :).

I have some TP-Link smart plugs and was happy with them for a long time because their app could be used without an account. Then I recently got the new version of the app and it forces an account, there's no more guest mode. I'm done with TP-Link now.

The whole Tapo/Kasa interop thing was badly handled too a few years back. Put me right off, when most were dangling the seamless integration carrot to distract you from the vendor lock-in.

> all routers are uniformly fucking awful [...] the world has become trained that rebooting a router once a week and praying that it works when it comes back is a perfectly normal state of affairs

My OPNsense router currently has 74 days of uptime, and that's just because I ran an update 74 days ago. I've never rebooted it to solve a problem. The only wrinkle is OPNsense (and pfSense) is at least an order of magnitude more complicated than your average consumer router.

OTOH, my ubiquity access point reboots itself every time I change any setting at all.

> all routers are uniformly fucking awful,

The mikrotik I've been using has been pretty solid, and super super customizable.

Eve smart plugs are solid and don’t have any unnecessary cloud stuff.

I bought a dedicated router and separate WAPs and cable modem and it works really well. The converged devices are terrible though.